Love is in the air. It’s
the beginning of spring here in Marin County.
And it might also seem a paradox to combine Valentine’s Day with Evolution Sunday, a national event in which progressive preachers like myself are expressing the compatibility of serious science with religion. But what better time to remember that love is a natural fact, one that needs to be examined under the lens of science and also celebrated and enriched through the eyes of faith?
We go to school and we get sex education. And that’s a good thing. We do need to know how the plumbing works. We need a solid fact-based, scientifically-grounded understanding of the birds and the bees. Public school is good at sex education. But I don’t think it is very good at sense education. The spiritual, sensual, experiential dimension is what makes the plumbing worth using in the first place, isn’t it? And it seems to me that the church is a perfect place for sense education. The cultivation of the spiritual, aesthetic, moral, and emotional senses. We church folks pick up where the doctors and the scientists leave off. Here’s a line from the Song of Solomon in the Bible: “Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.” Nothing about plumbing here in the Song of Solomon. Nothing about natural selection or survival of the fittest. No reference to body parts with Latin names. No, here we have the poetry of love. Here we have a meditation on what romantic love looks and feels like. Here’s a line from the first letter of John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.” There’s no talk here of x and y chromosomes, or of endorphins or adrenaline. No, here we have deep spiritual wisdom about the nature of love. Let the public schools teach hard science and cold facts. And let the churches and temples teach about the feelings, the meanings, the purposes, the glories and the pitfalls of love.
Because love is a natural fact. It is what makes the world go ‘round. Really! Because if you look at it poetically, you might say that gravity is like love – a natural attraction that keeps the earth from zinging away from the sun and into the cruel cold of deep space. Natural selection, the survival of the fittest – the biochemical attractions that result in mating and reproduction of all creatures from single-celled organisms to ourselves – these processes, so far best explained by the theory of evolution, naturally results in higher and higher levels of consciousness. The capacity of our brains for reflection, for contemplation, for spiritual experience – this capacity is the result of evolution. Our propensity to come to church on Sunday is a natural fact – a consequence of billions of years of natural history and development. There are books that explore the biochemistry of spirituality, that explain the functions of the neurotransmitters that are activated when we have religious experiences. This is fascinating and wonderful stuff that definitely has its place. But so does the fuzzy, unscientific, imprecise realm of religion and poetry and music and art, which help us express the way it all feels, help us express what it means to us, help us express what we want to do about it. Religion helps us ask big questions. Some of those questions can be answered by science, and some cannot. Some can be answered only with poetry.
“Intelligent design” isn’t a theory because it offers no cogent explanation of how the “intelligent designer” did the designing. It has no place in science education because it amounts to circular reasoning – it presumes its own conclusion. The theory of evolution does not contradict our experience of God. On the contrary – it demonstrates the awesome wonder of divinity.
It’s
easy to mix up religion and science. Fundamentalist Christians aren’t the only ones to fall into this
confusion. I hear people mixing up
quantum mechanics and spirituality all the time, in ways that don’t do either
discipline justice. In particle physics
there are subatomic phenomena that have fields that extend to the entire
universe. It’s easy for otherwise
educated folks to jump to the conclusion that therefore the fields of the
subatomic events in your brain exist everywhere in the universe and can be
picked up telepathically by others far away, enabling thoughts to travel. There might be a grain of truth in this leap
of across the boundary of science and religion, but the cold, hard fact is that
we humans do a rotten job of reading each others’ minds, even when we’re in the
same room! The signal interference is
terrible – worse even that trying to receive a cell phone call in mountainous
Religion can inspire scientists to seek
answers. Its moral power can impel
scientists to find solutions to humanitarian needs, and it can provide
metaphors and images for them to use in forming thoughts and solving
problems. But religion does not provide
a framework for rigorous empirical testing of these ideas. Likewise, science can inspire religion,
providing it with ideas that can inspire poetry and liturgy and music that
expresses our ineffable experiences. But
if we try to quantify transcendence, we lose the poetry, and religion goes
cold.
I do a lot of marital counseling because we do so many weddings here. So many of the couples I marry are between two very different people – different styles, ways of thinking and living. As long as they celebrate their differences and make best use of each other’s proclivities, they can be wonderful partners.
So this Valentine’s Day and Evolution Sunday let us pray that science and religion will romance each other in a way that honors their individuality and celebrates their distinct roles. Let us bring sex education and sense education together. Let’s watch Darwin and Jesus dance! Let us open our hearts to each other and celebrate the juicy truth that love is a natural fact.